Thermal management can be critical for systems such as mobile devices. This is because the system performance can be thermally limited by a maximum allowable junction temperature in most use cases. Skin temperature can be another important design constraint because high surface temperature can make the device uncomfortable to use or can result in local skin burns. For example, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) typically require 45° C. as the maximum allowable temperature for plastic surfaces and 40° C. for metallic surfaces. Thus, the system performance can sometimes be thermally limited by the skin temperatures.
Therefore, in systems such as mobile electronic devices, it would be desirable to address one or both of comfortable surface touch temperature and maximum temperature limitations of critical internal components such as central processing unit (CPU), graphics processing unit (GPU), power management integrated circuit (PMIC), and so on. Conventionally, cooling solutions for mobile devices are software-based thermal mitigation and thermal/mechanical-based passive heat spreading.